Video Drop Outs on some HD channels

Sunday afternoon I watched the movie "The Education of Charlie Banks" on Showtime Next and every 20 seconds or so the video would flash black and flick back on. No audio problems and I did not see the problem on Fox News HD when I flipped back and forth.

Sunday night I turned on WGN HD to watch the 9 PM news and saw same thing. Interestingly enough I went to my second HD reciever and saw same symptom... video flashes to black every 20 seconds or so.

Sunday afternoon I watched the movie "The Education of Charlie Banks" on Showtime Next and every 20 seconds or so the video would flash black and flick back on. No audio problems and I did not see the problem on Fox News HD when I flipped back and forth.

Sunday night I turned on WGN HD to watch the 9 PM news and saw same thing. Interestingly enough I went to my second HD reciever and saw same symptom... video flashes to black every 20 seconds or so.

I checked Discovery HD and History HD and they were rock solid.

Any thoughts on this probelm I saw? Encoding errors?

===
Bill

Click to expand...

I have it on all the movie channels and many other non movie HD Channels. From what research I did it is a Directv Issue.

Got Showtime free for 3 months, been trying to watch a few things, and noticed the video dropout as you describe. Only seems to happen on Showtime for me. I just quit watching, even free can't entice me to watch 20 second cycling blackouts.

Knock on wood, but I haven't noticed any of the dropouts you describe, although I'm not watching those same channels. Dropouts are a symptom of HDMI problems and it might be your receiver/display connection that is giving you these. If you can, connect the component output from your receiver to your display and see if the dropouts occur. You didn't mention how you connected the second receiver that showed the same problems, but was it over the same HDMI connection or were you using HDMI? Encoding problems nor signal dropouts usually don't show up as black frames, but HDMI problems do. Something for you to check out.

This happens to me on Encore. I know it's not the TV or the HDMI connection since I see it on 2 different TVs and it's recorded into the buffer - I can actually frame advance through a single frame of black. Drove me nuts the other night when I was trying to watch Groundhog Day. A call to D* only got me the answer that they'd "have a technician look into it".